Young Kurdish Woman Finds Biz Opportunities In Beauty
Young people in Kurdistan are embracing new opportunities to develop and expand their own businesses. Suzanne Presto speaks to one young woman who balances a family, two beauty salons and entrepreneurial classes – while planning to expand her beauty business in the northern city of Irbil.
Chnar Raza sets to her work in the beauty salon, expertly taking the scissors to a woman’s long highlighted hair, chopping off four inches of length with each confident snip. The animated young Kurdish woman, with shiny raven hair and expertly applied dark eyeliner, has been in the beauty business for 11 years, since she left school as a 13-year-old with a desire to open her own salon.
Since 2002, Raza has been running the Rishma Salon. Her beauty shop sits on a busy street lined with low-lying buildings in Irbil’s Newroz neighborhood.
She is so busy with clients that she is open from eight in the morning until eight at night, six or seven days each week, providing haircuts and styling, and applying brightly hued make-up to freshly washed faces, in the two salon chairs facing a long counter and mirror that make up her small salon.
The sound of the generator that provides electricity for the hairdryers whirs loudly outside the window, drowned out a bit by women chattering as hair dye takes hold and luminescent face creams seep into their pores. They line the benches along the length of the shop. It is warm, and the small salon smells of hairspray and heat.
Raza, a mother of two, says she always knew she wanted her own business. As a teenage newlywed, Raza sold her wedding gold to afford the rent for this salon space. She decided that gold in a safe would not benefit her or her family, but renting a salon and working in beauty just might. Read full article.
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